Landscape ecological urbanism: effective strategy for resilient cities How can landscape design be integrated in urban planning, reshaping urbanity and creating a new scenery? Strategic Proposal for the city of Prishtina

Abstract

The objective of the contribution is to understand how landscape design can be integrated in the urban planning, through a multiscalar approach able to remodel the city, and by creating a new urban scenery that comes from the territorial and cultural uniqueness of the intervention’s context, being at the same time able to fulfil the global challenges (for example, how cities adapt to climate changes) that contemporary cities are called upon to give urgent answers to, in terms of urban resilience’s improvement through actions of adaptation ad mitigation. The present debate on the settlement of agreements, guidelines and Best Management Practices to reduce the negative relapses of the anthropic development orients the strategies of redesigning cities starting with the integration of landscape ecological design in the urbanized space’s planning. The goal is to avoid, minimize and better manage the environmental impacts brought by urbanization, following a process of sustainable planning and guarding the ecology and the specificities of the landscape, in response to the goals established by international agreements. This consciousness makes us orient the debate towards the possible overlap and application of means offered by the guidelines of international programs, shared and well-established, and towards seeing Prishtina as an ecological and resilient city with the aim to becoming a new capital of Europe. Generally speaking, the actions involved that can have positive incomes regarding the ability to create a synergic and symbiotic relation between man-made and natural space. Specifically speaking, these actions can be translated into: restraining the urban expansion, protecting the natural resources (air and water), protecting and implementing biodiversity, reducing the soils consumption, restraining the environmental risk factors (landslides, flood), improving the environmental quality and the urban microclimate (reduction of the UHI phenomenon). Starting with some considerations on many international cases of land and city management, European directives, integrated landscape ecology urbanism planning, and green-blue infrastructures’ design, the focus is on the chances of intervention in the city of Prishtina, in relation to the recent allocation of an instrument of national planning that requires the definition of a far-sighted urban plan that is able to compare Prishtina to the other European capital cities. Today Prishtina gives us a chaotic and fragmented picture of itself. Its present, unresolved condition of chaos is creating considerations about the image of the city to be approved in the European confrontation. A study on the possibilities for Prishtina to delineate strategic actions is to increase the urban resilience emerged, facing the high level of pollution and congestion of a city that had an important urban growth without a planning. Starting from here, we have evaluations on the importance of healing what’s there and developing new connections, on the principle of a reduced environmental impact, able to connect the fragments into a framework. It will be essential to pursue an integrated approach between territorial, urban and architectonic scales, with specific interventions in the urban tissue, able to build step by step a picture of Prishtina as a new European capital city, with an improved environmental welfare and life quality.